Hi there everyone,
I've returned from Cannes and i feel....grrreat! everyones talking about the end of the tunnel, we 've seen the light at the end and it is shining bright!
In fact, they say The future of music is so bright, I think I need shades ;-)--->
Seriously, looking at the amount of new ways to get music to the people, one would forget that this business is in quite a spot, for the most important thing of all is missing, the food, the fat, the dough or to put it plainly, the money.
The Industry has been giving this quite a thought, and nowadays almost weekly a new thriving business model sees the daylight: Sellaband, Subscription fees and eat as much as you can , DRM free shops, and lately more and more free catalogues for ads..
It's this last system that intrigues me most, and is pushing for the mainstream to become the dominant system .
What is the idea, well, for instance let's say Universal lets you download everything from it's catalogue for free, the only thing you as a consumer must do is watch a little commercial , and zap , bob's your uncle, the music is yours !
Sounds phoney?
Well as a matter of fact it may be the future.
The idea being that the commercial pays for the download, and so the money is in the basket and pays for the rights or the artist and the consumer gets the song for free.
Everybody happy .... time for a nap...
But before you doze off , there is this little snag i would like to address you about...
Apparently the big shots from the record industry have been doing some crucial learning from someone else in the industry: the collecting societies!
For what is happening here is the transition from selling an artist to getting money for a catalogue, or to say it in a more fashionable way, the transition of personalized to generic collection of money for music.
This is something the collecting societies have been doing with ever increasing succes the last couple of years when they started to collect the so called Levy tax on private copying on all systems with capacity of making copies: hard disks and flash memory in computers, iPods and even cell phones.
These levies have been collected but there is no way in knowing who that money should go to , for there isn't a system in use to know ho is actually being copied.
Result: Billions upon billions have been collected , and not been redistributed.
What's all this got to do with the comercial i hear you say..
Lets get back to the new way of selling music the companies have figured out, you've got a catalogue of hundreds of thousands of songs , and you've got a couple of big firms wanting to pay for all the people ready to download them.
Is there a system gonna be in place to track down who sees what , and who gets what from the big amount?
Or will the companies , like the collecting societies, forget to implement this technological system, and be left holding a huge amount of faceless money , that only the artist with the management and lawyers could somehow claim a share from?
If they have learned anything from the collecting societies, it's bound to be the latter,
By the way..
Didn't they just all decide to do away with DRM once and for good?
Get back to you later!
